The present invention relates to the integration of business applications in an integrated business solutions computing environment. More specifically, the present invention relates to maintaining the order of messages and documents when processed or transformed by an enterprise server.
The current business environment is very different from what it was just a few years ago. Today's organizations embrace the global marketplace, and this dictates a need to be able to efficiently operate at all times. Customers are now more sophisticated which translates into an accelerated pace of business and decision-making processes. Further, business relationships have become highly dynamic, and customers expect businesses to adapt quickly.
Technical and operational challenges abound as well. There is a need to support multiple applications on a variety of platforms, and to integrate with companies using the Internet, extranets, business to business (B2B) exchanges, and other resources. Also, to effectively compete in today's market, there is a need to build new solutions on “Internet time,” utilizing open Internet standards and technology to assure maximum interoperability.
Businesses have typically used a variety of mechanisms to control and analyze business operations such as accounting, payroll, human resources, employee tracking, customer relations tracking, etc. Tools which provide these functions are often implemented using computer software. For example, a software package may manage business accounting, another software package might be responsible for receiving new orders, yet another software package will track warehouse inventory and still another package may handle order fulfillment and shipment. In another example, a business software package operated by one business will need to exchange data with a software package operated by another business to allow a business-to-business transaction to occur.
When business tools are implemented in software, it is not unusual for proprietary software packages to be responsible for each individual business task. However, this implementation is cumbersome and requires the same data to be entered in differing formats among the various business applications. In order to improve efficiency, integration applications have been developed which are used to integrate various elements of one business application with elements of another business application.
For example, if a software package, which is used to obtain new orders, includes data fields (or “entities”) referred to as CustomerNameLast and CustomerNameFirst, it is a relatively straightforward process to map those entries to an accounting software program having the data fields BillingAddressFirst and BillingAddressLast. In such an integration system, the relationship between entities in one system (i.e., computer system or application) and entities in another system can be stored in tables. A system administrator can configure entity mapping between the systems by selecting between the various entities of the two systems.
When an integration system actually executes the transaction between the source application and the destination application as defined by the mapping process, several steps occur. First the source application creates a document or message, which contains data stored as entities, and transmits or publishes that document or message to the integration application. The integration application transforms the document or message according to the transformation processes defined during the mapping. Then the integration application posts the transformed message to the destination application.
However, during the publishing and posting of documents and messages between the source and destination applications several problems often arise that affect the reliability of the system. One notable problem is that messages are published to the integration application in order, but are often processed through the server out of order. The integration application does not provide for the concept of ordered delivery of messages. For example, updates from an application are published in order, however, the integration application often seizes these updates as a batch of multiple messages and this results in the loss of ordering or priority of the messages. Thus, a newer update can process before an older update. This results in the posting in the destination application of out-of-date information.
Another problem that has been observed in integration applications used in a B2B environment is that messages often fail to post successfully, because other information necessary to the successful posting of the message has not been created in the destination system. For example, when a customer places a sales order for a product, certain events must be created prior to the processing of the customer's order. If the customer has chosen a specific method of shipping, this method of shipping must exist in the receiving system for the order to successfully post. If this order is not present in the receiving system, the message will not be able to post, and thus fail. However, if the sales order could have been held and not submitted for posting until the shipping method had been created then the message would have posted successfully.
Another problem that occurs is that messages and documents are published from the source system in an order that makes sense for the source system, but the destination system needs the documents in a different order. This typically occurs when in the source system one entity is a parent entity for another entity, but in the destination system the same entity is a child entity. For example in one system the parent entity is a contact name and the child entity is the business name, whereas in another system the parent entity is the business name and the contact name is the child entity. To integrate documents between the two systems it is desirable to ensure that the parent entity for the destination system posts before the child entity attempts to post.
Therefore, it is desirable to have an integration application or system that takes into account the order in which documents and messages are published to the application, takes into account the relationship between various documents, and considers the relationship between the various entities in the documents and messages when posting the messages to the destination system.